What's New in Oracle Net Services?

This section describes the new networking features of Oracle9i release 9.0 and provides pointers to additional information. New features information from previous releases is also retained to help those users migrating to the current release.

Oracle9i Release 9.0 New Features in Oracle Net Services

The new features for Oracle Net Services in release 9.0 include:

Name Change to Networking Components

To provide consistency with Oracle9i, several name changes to networking products, features, and parameters have been made in this release. The following table maps the former product and feature names to their new names.

The following table maps the multi-threaded server (MTS) parameters and dynamic view names to the new names associated with shared server. Except for the MTS_MAX_SERVERS parameter, the old parameter names are maintained for backward compatibility to Oracle8i. Oracle Corporation recommends migrating to the new names.

MTS Parameter/View Name

New Shared Server Parameter/View Name

MTS_CIRCUITS initialization parameter

CIRCUITS initialization parameter

MTS_DISPATCHERS initialization parameter

DISPATCHERS initialization parameter

MTS_MAX_DISPATCHERS initialization parameter

MAX_DISPATCHERS initialization parameter

MTS_MAX_SERVERS initialization parameter

MAX_SHARED_SERVERS initialization parameter

MTS_SERVERS initialization parameter

SHARED_SERVERS initialization parameter

MTS_SESSIONS initialization parameter

SHARED_SERVER_SESSIONS initialization parameter

V$MTS view

V$SHARED_SERVER_MONITOR view

Connection Load Balancing for Dedicated Server Configurations

Configurations that use dedicated servers can now use the connection load balancing feature that was previously available only for shared server configurations.

In future releases, Oracle Names will not be supported as a centralized naming method. As Oracle Names is deprecated in favor of directory naming with LDAP-compliant directory servers, Oracle Names LDAP Proxy servers provide a way for release 8.1.5 or previous clients that do not support directory naming to use the same data as is used for directory naming. Oracle Names LDAP Proxy servers are Oracle Names servers that have been configured to proxy for LDAP-compliant directory servers. Upon startup, Oracle Names LDAP Proxy servers obtain network object information from a directory server. This provides a single point of definition for all data in a directory server and does not require that both Oracle Names servers and directory servers be maintained separately and simultaneously.

Oracle protocol support now includes support for the Virtual Interface (VI) protocol. VI is a thin protocol that is more efficient than TCP/IP. Applications perform better using VI, because VI places most of the messaging burden upon high-speed network hardware, freeing the CPU for other tasks. The VI protocol is best deployed for application Web server and inter-database server communication where the servers are co-located.

Support for NDS as an authentication method and as anexternal naming method is no longer supported. If you are using NDS as an external naming method, Oracle Corporation recommends using directory naming instead.

Parameters in the protocol.ora file have been merged into the sqlnet.ora file. These parameters enable you to configure access control to the database, as well as no delays in TCP/IP buffer flushing. These parameters include:

If you have a protocol.ora file in the $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin directory on UNIX, and the ORACLE_HOME\network\admin directory on Windows operating systems, Oracle Net Manager, when first started, automatically merges the protocol.ora parameters into the sqlnet.ora file.

There may be operating system specific parameters in protocol.ora that are node specific. For this reason, Oracle Corporation recommends not sharing sqlnet.ora with other nodes after merging or adding these parameters.

SPX Protocol

Protocol addresses using the SPX protocol must be replaced. Oracle Net provides support for the following network protocols:

With the connect descriptor INSTANCE_ROLE parameter, you can specify a connection to the primary or secondary instance of Oracle9i Real Application Clusters and Oracle9i Real Application Clusters Guard configurations.